Gentoo Weekly Newsletter 8 January 2007

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gentoo Weekly Newsletter http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20070108-newsletter.xmlThis is the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of 8 January 2007. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As anyone who has used Gentoo's Bugzilla[1] bug tracker in the last few months is already aware, our old Bugzilla system was underpowered for our needs and would commonly have performance issues which resulted in a significant amount of time wasted by developers, and duplicate bug reports being entered by our users. Well, that time is no more!

Gentoo sponsor Global Netoptex, Inc[2] (GNi, featured below) offered to help by providing a new platform for hosting our vital bug tracker. The new platform is built on IBM Bladecenter blades, with a SAN for back-end storage. The database is load balanced between two HS20 blades with 3.2 GHz Xeons, with the web front-end on a third blade server. Along with the new hardware platform comes a new Bugzilla team to manage the servers and a newer version of the Bugzilla software.

Gentoo would like to thank Robin H. Johnson[3], Mike Doty[4], Lance Albertson[5], Jeff Forman[6], Ned Ludd[7], and Corey Shields[8] for the months of work and testing to make this migration possible and GNi for providing the hardware.

Alexey Shvetsow[9] (from the Russian Gentoo community[10]) got Gentoo and Enlightenment E17 running on his HP iPAQ hx4700[11]. The PDA has a 624MHz Xscale (ARM) CPU, 64MB RAM and a touchscreen with 480x640 resolution. Alexey did not like how the Windows Mobile installed on the PDA worked with documents and especially with PDF files. So what was his solution? Try installing Gentoo. It works! He took a few photos from the iPAQ running E17, which you can view at the Russian community Gentoo FTP site[12]. Alexey noticed that for more usability on handhelds, there should be support for virtual keyboards in entrance and e17 itself. Alexey is currently writing on the Russian wiki about his experiences.

If you are interested in buying one of these PDAs or already have one and want to run E17 on it, please contact Alexey[9].

9. alexxy [at] gentoo

SCALE to host Women in Open Source mini conference --------------------------------------------------

The Southern California Linux Expo announces plans to a 'Women In Open Source' mini-conference. The goals of the conference are to encourage women to use technology and open source and free software, and to explore the obstacles that women face in breaking into the technology industry. The audience will be those women who may have an interest in technology, but hesitate to get into it because they believe it's a male-only club. The conference will be held in conjunction with the fifth annual Southern California Linux Expo, at the Westin LAX Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The 'Women in Open Source' mini-conference will be held February 9th.

If you are interested in speaking, there are still speaker slots available. Contact Gareth Greenaway[13] with your talk proposal.

13. gareth [at] socallinuxexpo

================================================ 2. Featured sponsor: Global Netoptex, Inc. (GNi) ================================================ This week, the GWN staff had the chance to interview Derek Wise, the CEO and founder of Global Netoptex, Inc., one of Gentoo's hardware and hosting sponsors. Derek and GNi[2] have both been long-time supporters of Gentoo, so this interview is a special treat.

We also hosted DevCon 2005 (the Gentoo Developer Conference) in San Francisco last year and have been supporting Gentoo for about 4 years now, in general.

Where are you utilizing Gentoo? -------------------------------

Gentoo is our primary Linux distribution for all production, development, and support systems. We honestly only have one Red Hat box in the network, and I still cannot recall why. We also propagate Gentoo to our clients as we host dedicated servers. When the client is open to an alternative to Red Hat, we often recommend Gentoo as a preferred distribution.

What does being a Gentoo sponsor mean to you? ---------------------------------------------

We feel that providing high-end infrastructure and support is really the best way that we can support Gentoo. Because we are an enterprise organization, we rely on Gentoo's infrastructure and availability. This way, we get to give back to the community, while making it more reliable and scalable for everyone. We feel that the best way to give back to the community is in the same manner that developers do, with the services we can provide that make Gentoo better. Getting $20 is cool, but having your database server up when you need it is priceless.

How many current/former Gentoo developers work for GNi? -------------------------------------------------------

Currently, we have 2 current/former Gentoo developers employed at GNi, with plans to hire more (submit your resume to careers [at] gni). With the quantity of servers that we deploy Gentoo on, it's a real need to have qualified Gentoo developers employed in house.

How much time (on average) do they get to work on Gentoo issues while "on the clock"? -------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no pre-defined time for this, but we encourage our team to actively participate in the community, when possible. We use Gentoo a lot internally for our own infrastructure and for our clients. Sometimes what has to be done is for our own network and sometimes it's for the portage tree itself.

What are you doing for other open source projects? --------------------------------------------------

We've created what we call "Org Haven". It is specifically designed to assist Open Source and Non-Profit organizations in getting a reliable infrastructure for little to no cost at all. While this is in beta at one of our San Francisco data centers with our primary tenant being ISC, it is planned to be much more than just a single site system. In 2007 we will be providing this service out of our datacenters worldwide. Open Source / Non-Profits have the same needs as Enterprise software companies... they just need a little help with the cost :) You can contact orghaven [at] gni to see if your group qualifies. The URL http://www.orghaven.com will go live later this year with more details.

Tell us more about GNi. -----------------------

GNi (Global Netoptex, Inc.) was founded in December of 2001, when my former employer, Enron Broadband Services, filed for bankruptcy and abandoned clients in California. We began from there, building an engineer-lead organization with a primary focus on customer support. A few years later, we are in 9 cities, 70 employees today, and growing across the US, and soon internationally. We primarily serve from the individual power user to the large enterprise for everything from dedicated hosting and bandwidth, to full datacenter management and support teams.

The GWN staff would like to thank Derek for the interview and for their support of Gentoo.

========================= 3. Heard in the community ========================= gentoo-dev ----------

2.6.19 going stable in 1 week

Daniel Drake has requested that gentoo-sources-2.6.19 be marked stable by the x86 and amd64 teams on January 14. He also asked maintainers of external kernel modules to make sure that their packages compile against the new kernel or file a request to block at bug #156669.

He warned there may be some delay due to regressions, as well as the effect of the celebrated mmap filesystem corruption bug[14].

Alec Warner warned ebuild maintainers not to use the debug eclass. The tree has be cleansed of all use of the eclass. Maintainers of overlays will receive a series of warnings to encourage them to abandon the eclass.

Caleb Tennis asked what workaround or substitute should be used for the late eclass. It was suggested that a normal IUSE should suffice.

======================= 6. Gentoo package moves ======================= This section lists packages that have either been moved or added to the tree and packages that have had their "last rites" announcement given to be removed in the future. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners[18] and various developers. Most packages which are listed under the Last Rites section are in need of some love and care and can remain in the tree if proper maintainership is established.

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org[1]) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 31 December 2006 and 07 January 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:

* 937 new bugs during this period * 444 bugs closed or resolved during this period * 18 previously closed bugs were reopened this period * 121 closed as NEEDINFO/WONTFIX/CANTFIX/INVALID/UPSTREAM during this period * 168 bugs marked as duplicates during this period

Of the 10750 currently open bugs: 26 are labeled 'blocker', 93 are labeled 'critical', and 472 are labeled 'major'.

Closed bug rankings -------------------

The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:

The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:

* Gentoo Games[93], with 50 new bugs[97] * Default Assignee for New Packages[98], with 33 new bugs[99] * Gentoo's Team for Core System packages[83], with 12 new bugs[100] * Seemant Kulleen[101], with 9 new bugs[102] * Default Assignee for Orphaned Packages[87], with 8 new bugs[103] * AMD64 Project[95], with 7 new bugs[104] * Elfyn McBratney (beu)[105], with 6 new bugs[106] * Luis Medinas[107], with 5 new bugs[108]

The GWN is staffed by volunteers and members of the community who submit ideas and articles. If you are interested in writing for the GWN, have feedback on an article that we have posted, or just have an idea or article that you would like to submit to the GWN, please send us your feedback[109] and help make the GWN better.